Tag Archives: college students

College students don’t know how to use Google

Posted on by

I recently heard about this study at a faculty development day: college students have difficulty understanding and using search results.

Researchers with the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries project watched 30 students at Illinois Wesleyan University try to search for different topics online and found that only seven of them were able to conduct “what a librarian might consider a reasonably well-executed search.”

The students “appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school,” Lynda Duke and Andrew Asher write in a book on the project coming out this fall.

At all five Illinois universities, students reported feeling “anxious” and confused when trying to research. Many felt overwhelmed by the volume of results their searches would turn up, not realizing that there are ways to narrow those searches and get more tailored results. Others would abandon their research topics when they couldn’t find enough sources, unaware that they were using the wrong search terms or database for their topics.

The researchers found that students did not know “how to build a search to narrow or expand results, how to use subject headings, and how various search engines (including Google) organize and display results.” That means that some students didn’t understand how to search only for news articles, or only for scholarly articles. Most only know how to punch in keywords and hope for the best.

Such trust in technology. Wonder where this came from?

I like how anthropologists were involved in this study. Including an observation component could make this data quite unique. I don’t think many people would think that ethnographic methods could be used to examine such up-to-date technology.

Several other thoughts:

1. How many adults could explain how Google displays pages?

1a. If people knew how Google organized things, would they go elsewhere for information?

2. Finding and sorting through information is a key problem of our age. The problem is not a lack of information or possible sources; rather, there is too much.

3. Who exactly in schools should be responsible for teaching this? Librarians, perhaps, but students have limited contact. Preferably, all teachers/professors should know something about this and talk about it. Parents could also impart this information at home.

4. I’m now tempted to ask students to include all of their search terms in final projects so that I can check and see whether they actually sorted through articles or they simply picked the top few results.

Sociological findings of Academically Adrift in Doonesbury

Posted on by

The findings of Academically Adrift stirred up a lot of discussion. (See an earlier post here.) Eight months after the book was released, its findings made it way to the Sunday comics (August 14) as Doonesbury picked up on the information.

Neither colleges or emerging adults look too good here.

It would be interesting to hear Gary Trudeau talk about how he discovered this information and what he wanted to say in this particular comic strip.

Argument: college students are poor writers because they ape the academic prose of their professors

Posted on by

An English professor argues that the problem with what students learn about writing in college is that they learn to write in the style of professors:

This Wall Street Journal article implies that our poor communication skills fresh out of college result from simple laziness or stupidity on our part. But Dr. Richard Lanham, professor emeritus of English, UCLA, believes the problem is not lack of learning.

Rather, he believes, when we are undergraduates, we learn all too well: we learn to ape the bureaucratic, academic, clear-as-swamp-water prose of our professors. He writes in his book, Revising Prose (in my opinion the single best practical book on prose writing in existence):

“Much bad writing today comes not from the conventional sources of verbal dereliction—sloth, original sin, or native absence of mind—but from stylistic imitation. It is learned, an act of stylistic piety, which imitates a single style, the bureaucratic style I have called The Official Style. . . .”

And to drive home his point, Lanham cites a passage from Talcott Parsons. This particular passage appears to be from Parsons’ book The Social System and you can see the passage here on page 7 in Google Book. (Interestingly, this passage is edited. Yes, it is difficult but why not cite a complete passage rather than starting at the end of a paragraph and cutting some of another?) Lanham says this about Parsons’ passage:

This is not prose. This is the systematic abuse of prose. Anyone hoping to learn writing should stay a thousand miles away from people who write in such a manner. That is, they should stay a thousand miles away from most university professors.

The author of this article goes on to cite Sokol’s Social Text hoax, argue that computers could teach academic writing (though it may not make any sense), and suggest that college students need to get beyond typical college classes.

The trend these days in college seems to be to train students to write in discipline specific styles: if you are a biology major, write a biologist, a sociology major, write like a sociologist (though not like Parsons), and son. This makes some sense for faculty as our professional careers are based on particular writing styles. It may not make sense for all students as they may not be interested in graduate school or professional careers. But, if students are specific majors, part of their senior-level competency should be an ability to communicate within that sphere.

However, the problem referenced at the beginning at the article may not be the same problem cited in the rest of the article. The article begins by citing a Wall Street Journal article saying that businesses are having a hard time finding possible employees who can write and speak effectively. But this problem is not the problem of academic writing; rather, it is an issue of basic communication. Employers aren’t saying that college grads are writing postmodern gibberish; rather, they are saying that applicants write as though they are interacting with friends. Academic writing may be problematic (and it is recurring issue within sociology though most work doesn’t read like Parsons) but the problem employers are discussing is a few steps before academic writing.

If college students are trained in any discipline specific style and can successfully write within that world, that’s better than not being able to write any prose. Theoretically, students should be able to write basic prose before they write discipline specific prose but some prose is better than no prose, right? Students need to learn the basics, thesis, supporting evidence, etc., and perhaps the average professor is not able to offer much help in this since they are immersed in academic language.

For students to move beyond simply aping the academic style of their professors, they need to practice writing a lot. Even while there might be guidelines and norms within particular disciplines, there is still freedom within these areas to exhibit some personal style. Within sociology, for example, there is a wide range between ethnographic and statistical/mathematical work. Styles are not formulas. Of course, more writing means more work for students and professors. But there is evidence that an increase in writing within academic courses leads to better educational outcomes.

On the whole, I think this is a bigger issue than academics passing along bad prose to their students. Sociologists could indeed do better than writing like Talcott Parsons. All classes should help students write basic, effective prose that can be used outside of the college classroom. How all this could and should be worked out within a typical four-year degree needs to be developed.

Beating up on the sociology degree

Posted on by

I spotted two stories in recent days that suggest sociology majors have no value. The first was at the Wall Street Journal and titled “Sociology and Other ‘Meathead’ Majors“:

In this happy season of college graduations, students and parents will probably not be reflecting on the poor choices those students made in selecting their courses and majors…Most colleges offer a cornucopia of choices, and most of the choices are bad.

The bad choices are more attractive because they are easy. Picking not quite at random, let’s take sociology. That great American democrat Archie Bunker used to call his son-in-law “Meathead” for his fatuous opinions, and Meathead was a graduate student in sociology. A graduate student in sociology is one who didn’t get his fill of jargonized wishful thinking as an undergraduate. Such a person will never fail to disappoint you. But sociology has close competitors in other social sciences (including mine, political science) and in the humanities…

Others try to imitate the sciences and call themselves “social scientists.” The best imitators of scientists are the economists. Among social scientists they rank highest in rigor, which means in mathematics. They also rank highest in boastful pretension, and you can lose more money listening to them than by trying to read books in sociology. Just as Gender Studies taints the whole university with its sexless fantasies, so economists infect their neighbors with the imitation science they peddle. (Game theorists, I’m talking about you.)

I am not quite sure what is going on here as Mansfield indicts a broad swath of disciplines, including implicating his own field of political science. Is he suggesting that the natural sciences are not “counterfeit majors” because they deal with facts? Should colleges be steering all students away from majors other than the natural sciences that are unwilling to make value judgments? Mansfield seems more interested in making inflammatory comments about other disciplines than in providing solutions to the problems of the modern university. And the affirmation of Archie Bunker’s views of his son-in-law seems strange considering Bunker’s conservative and inflammatory viewpoints.

The second putdown came in the opening to a piece about the spelling bee in the Washington Post:

The National Spelling Bee, now underway — or it it weigh? — is a hilarious concept. What better way to announce to the world at large that you have a totally useless and unmarketable skill — besides, I guess, framing your sociology degree? You’re a world-champion speller, eh? Do you also play the mountain dulcimer? That might have more practical applications in the workforce.

I’m guessing this is supposed to be facetious but still, it suggests a sociology degree is akin to having a “totally useless and unmarketable skill.”

Perhaps this is all part of the larger discussion about the value of college and getting a job but I suspect there will be many more opinions thrown out there about certain disciplines and sociology in particular. It looks like sociologists should continue to think about how to best describe the value of sociology for both our students and the broader world.

Even Shakespeare doesn’t like McMansions

Posted on by

As the debate over the value of certain college majors continues, William Shakespeare responds and defends the liberal arts and also knocks McMansions:

See, when I wrote all those plays back in the day, I had no intention of helping the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs. No, I was after something else altogether. (If you don’t understand this, please do not feel alone; this great stage of fools is plenty crowded.) To be sure, one should not attempt to mine A Midsummer Night’s Dream for literal fortune, unless, of course, you’re in the tights-and-tunics trade. But that’s another matter…

Students can do worse than to take literature courses, like ones devoted to my work, or to that of Toni Morrison, or even to depressing saps like Melville. To study literature is to practice critical thinking; to write about texts is to hone writing skills. The very things that the masters of industry demand in their employees, no?

Shakespeare seems to have heard the selling points for a liberal arts education.

The phrase that interests me: “the bright-eyed brats of the future find their way to high-paying jobs and McMansions in the ’burbs.” This seems to be a broad indictment of how students (and others?) view college: it is about making money and living comfortably as one pursues the American dream. In contrast, the liberal arts promotes thinking and wrestling with the big questions that humans have sought to answer throughout history. But do McMansions and critical thinking have to be mutually exclusive? McMansion seems to refer here more to the homeowners themselves who are only interested in making money, getting ahead, and enjoying life. Is the opposite implication that critical thinkers would never purchase or build a McMansion because they would see its faults? Do critical thinkers (and liberal arts majors) only live in homes with character and history in the city?

Getting better data on how students use laptops in class: spy on them

Posted on by

Professors like to talk about how students use laptops in the classroom. Two recent studies shed some new light on this issue and they are unique in how they obtained the data: they spied on students.

Still, there is one notable consistency that spans the literature on laptops in class: most researchers obtained their data by surveying students and professors.

The authors of two recent studies of laptops and classroom learning decided that relying on student and professor testimony would not do. They decided instead to spy on students.

In one study, a St. John’s University law professor hired research assistants to peek over students’ shoulders from the back of the lecture hall. In the other, a pair of University of Vermont business professors used computer spyware to monitor their students’ browsing activities during lectures.

The authors of both papers acknowledged that their respective studies had plenty of flaws (including possibly understating the extent of non-class use). But they also suggested that neither sweeping bans nor unalloyed permissions reflect the nuances of how laptops affect student behavior in class. And by contrasting data collected through surveys with data obtained through more sophisticated means, the Vermont professors also show why professors should be skeptical of previous studies that rely on self-reporting from students — which is to say, most of them.

While these studies might be useful for dealing with the growing use of laptops in classrooms, discussing the data itself would be interesting. A few questions come to mind:

1. What discussions took place with an IRB? It seems that this might have been a problem in the study using spyware on student computers and this was reflected in the generalizability of the data with just 46% of students agreeing to have the spyware on their computer. The other study also could run into issues if students were identifiable. (Just a thought: could a professor insist on spyware being on student computers if the students insisted on having a laptop in class?)

2. These studies get at the disparities between self-reported data and other forms of data collection. I would guess that students would underestimate their distractable laptop use on self-reported surveys because they would suspect that this is the answer that they should give (social desirability bias). But it could also reveal things about how cognizant computer/Internet users are about how many windows and applications they actually cycle through.

3. Both of these studies are on a relatively small scale: one had 45 students, the other had a little more than 1,000 but the data was “less precise” since it involved TAs sitting in the back monitoring students. Expanding the Vermont study and linking laptop use to outcomes on a larger scale is even better: move beyond just talking about the classroom experience and look at its impact on learning outcomes. Why doesn’t someone do this on a larger scale and in multiple settings? Would it be too difficult to get past some of the IRB issues?

In looking at the comments about this story, it seems like having better data on this topic would go a long ways to moving the discussion beyond anecdotal evidence.

Students suffer withdrawal in a one day media blackout

Posted on by

Professors and teachers can often provide anecdotal evidence of how students react when told that smartphones (and other devices like laptops) are not to be used in the classroom. A new study suggests that the problem isn’t really the classroom: simply not having these devices at all could the issue.

Researchers found that 79 per cent of students subjected to a complete media blackout for just one day reported adverse reactions ranging from distress to confusion and isolation.

In vivid accounts, they told of overwhelming cravings, with one saying they were ‘itching like a crackhead [crack cocaine addict]’.

The study focused on people aged between 17 and 23 in ten countries, including the UK, where about 150 students at Bournemouth University spent 24 hours banned from using phones, social networking sites, the internet and TV.

They were allowed to use landline phones or read books and were asked to keep a diary.

One in five reported feelings of withdrawal akin to an addiction while 11 per cent said they were confused or felt like a failure.

Nearly one in five (19 per cent) reported feelings of distress and 11 per cent felt isolated. Just 21 per cent said they could feel the benefits of being unplugged.

Some students took their mobile phone with them just to touch them.

While some of these symptoms don’t seem as bad as others, it is interesting that only 21% “could feel the benefits” of being “unplugged.” These devices and SNS tools really have become necessities in a short amount of time.

In reactions to this study, it would be interesting to see whether people advocate a complete move away from such technology because of these possible dangerous side effects or if people suggest more moderate usage. But if usage is really is an addiction, then moderate usage could still be an issue. I would like to see a follow-up to this study that examines a longer-term media blackout – how long does it take for students to readjust to life without all this media and then what would be their thoughts about what they might be missing (or gaining)?

Sociologist finds many college students don’t learn critical thinking, reasoning, and writing skills

Posted on by

A new book (Academically Adrift) written by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roska suggests that many college students don’t graduate with certain skills that colleges claim to be teaching. Here is a brief summary of the findings:

Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin.

Arum, whose book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press) comes out this month, followed 2,322 traditional-age students from the fall of 2005 to the spring of 2009 and examined testing data and student surveys at a broad range of 24 U.S. colleges and universities, from the highly selective to the less selective.

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called “higher order” thinking skills.

Combining the hours spent studying and in class, students devoted less than a fifth of their time each week to academic pursuits. By contrast, students spent 51 percent of their time — or 85 hours a week — socializing or in extracurricular activities.

The study also showed that students who studied alone made more significant gains in learning than those who studied in groups.

I wonder how colleges would respond to these findings. Within a 4 year institution (and across the spectrum of 4 year institutions), there are bound to be some students who do well and others who have more struggles. I wonder how much is in this data about the individual level characteristics of students and whether the authors suggest that spending more time doing school work would make a difference. Is it the college students who need to do more work, is it the professors who should be assigning more or asking for more, is it a campus culture that privileges other things over academic work (like extracurricular activities), or some combination of these three?

This suggests schools need to spend more time and effort on these particular skills and need to find ways to assess these (and the students’ progress or need for improvement) within their time at a 4 year institution.

The sociologists suggest there are some differences between disciplines:

Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.

Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don’t preclude the possibility that such students “are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills.”

Greater gains in liberal arts subjects are at least partly the result of faculty requiring higher levels of reading and writing, as well as students spending more time studying, the study’s authors found. Students who took courses heavy on both reading (more than 40 pages a week) and writing (more than 20 pages in a semester) showed higher rates of learning.

So actually doing more reading and writing makes a difference, no matter what the discipline. What does this mean for liberal arts colleges – is it really the place where students develop these particular skills?

The story behind those who write papers purchased online

Posted on by

Cheating is common in schools and the opportunities to purchase papers online seems to be on the rise. The Chronicle of Higher Education features a testimonial from a “shadow scholar” who tells his story of writing dozens of papers and theses:

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I’ve worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic year, I am working on upward of 20 assignments.

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming…

Of course, I know you are aware that cheating occurs. But you have no idea how deeply this kind of cheating penetrates the academic system, much less how to stop it. Last summer The New York Times reported that 61 percent of undergraduates have admitted to some form of cheating on assignments and exams. Yet there is little discussion about custom papers and how they differ from more-detectable forms of plagiarism, or about why students cheat in the first place.

Sounds like we need some more research and figures about how often this particular type of cheating occurs.

There are some interesting thoughts in the comments about who is responsible for all of this and what professors can do about it. The “shadow scholar” suggests that certain segments of the college population are let down by the system and faculty must be burying their heads in the sand when a student can’t express themselves coherently in class and then comes up with an excellent paper. Some of the solutions presented in the comments: get to know your student’s writing very well so you can spot the gaps between their in-class writing and their suddenly strong papers; have students go through a number of drafts that theoretically makes it more difficult to purchase a paper (though “shadow scholar” gives some examples of writing and then revising papers); emphasize writing in schools so students aren’t put in this position where they can’t write.

How the liberal arts can be good for a future in business

Posted on by

Edward Tenner argues that there is evidence that liberal arts degrees can be very helpful for business careers. Tenner considers the ramifications of one survey that showed that certain fields assumed to have direct links to jobs, like psychology, do not lead to satisfied majors:

The survey has clear implications for the humanities. Their degrees are not the prologues to flipping burgers that some people suppose. Many students are using degrees in humanities to launch satisfying careers. Why not study how their courses have helped them? Why not find better ways to link the humanities with business?

What might be most helpful for students is to hear this information directly from business owners and managers.